Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 11 Jul 2006 18:10:01 -0700 (PDT) | Subject | Re: Will there be Intel Wireless 3945ABG support? | From | David Miller <> |
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From: Thomas Tuttle <thinkinginbinary@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 20:42:12 -0400
> Frankly, I'm annoyed that, if Intel understood the full extent of the > problem, that they didn't take a better approach and simply give the > card a set of legal values. It doesn't need to understand the > subtleties of what they mean. It just needs to know frequencies 1, 2, > and 3 are okay, but not 4, 5, and 6, and that the max power is xx dBm.
You miss many important issues in your diatribe. I don't like the situation either, but I hold this position understanding the conditions (both technical and legal) under which companies such as Atheros and Intel must operate.
First off, the reason these radios are fully programmable, not fixed in on-board firmware or likewise, is so that people doing "special stuff" outside the normal operating frequencies and power levels, and have a license to do so, can use these wireless chips out of the box. Otherwise custom boards would need to be produced and that is prohibitively expensive and restrictive for what some of these folks want to do.
Such companies can thus provide firmware or drivers that operate within a customer's specially licensed frequency or power range once that customer proves they do indeed have a license from the FCC to use it.
Secondarily, it is up to lawyers, not you, to decide what is a safe manner for the maker of a wireless chipset to abide by the FCC regulations. And across the board, lawyers representing these companies and other entities seem to agree that providing the full source code to a wireless chip driver's radio programming makes it "user-modifiable", whereas hiding the radio programming behind a binary-only blob or firmware satisfies the FCC requirements.
And if you think they haven't invested any effort to look into alternatives that will satisfy both the FCC and the open source crowd, think again. You can be sure they've spent a lot of time thinking about how to deal with this. It is absurd to say things which suggest that these guys are sitting around twiddling their thumbs about the issue, and think the current state of affairs is ok.
It's not a matter of "impossible" vs. "possible" to modify the frequencies and power levels outside of the allowed range, rather it's a matter of making it "difficult enough" for an end user to modify these restrictions.
As long as it's Intel's or Atheros's ass that gets reamed by the FCC for running afoul of the radio frequency regulations, they will not be posting the source code to program their radios. On the other hand, if it happens to get legally reverse engineered, then unless these companies assisted in that reverse engineering effort, the FCC really couldn't go after them. Such companies would also not be able to participate in maintainence of a driver for their chips containing the reverse engineered components. However, we've dealt with that kind of situation just fine in the past :)
So we will be in this endless loop finding ways to legally reverse engineer binary blobs to get fully free wireless drivers, until the FCC regulation situation is rectified. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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